April 30, 2010

The next four weekends would be a good time for Icelanders and art lovers to come home to Manitoba.

The Canada Iceland Arts Festival Inc. is hosting the fourth annual Nuna (now) Iceland Canada Art Convergence in Winnipeg and the Interlake. The celebration of Icelandic and Canadian art will take over every weekend in May with music, film, theatre and visual art events.

Festivities are kicking off on Friday with a screening of acclaimed Icelandic film Dreamland. Here’s a description of the film from www.dremland.is:

How much unspoiled nature should we preserve and what do we sacrifice for clean, renewable energy? Dreamland gradually turns into a disturbing picture of corporate power taking over small communities.

Dreamland is a film about a nation standing at cross-roads. Leading up to the country’s greatest economic crisis, the government started the largest mega project in the history of Iceland, to build the biggest dam in Europe to provide Alcoa cheap electricity for an aluminum smelter in the rugged east fjords of Iceland. Today Iceland is left holding a huge dept and an uncertain future.

In Dreamland a nation with abundance of choices gradually becomes caught up in a plan to turn its wilderness and beautiful nature into a massive system of hydro-electric and geothermal power plants with dams and reservoirs. Clean energy brings in polluting industry and international corporations. It’s the dark side of green energy.

Dreamland is showing at Cinematheque on April 30 at 7:00 p.m. for those of you in the city and at 2:00 p.m. on May 1 at Lady of the Lake in Gimli for the Interlakers.

Winnipeggers Oldfolks Home and Iceland’s FM Belfast will get the party started this weekend with shows at the Royal Albert and the Gimli Theatre. Check out www.nunanow.com for a full schedule of events.

- Kelly